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<title>The Value of Connections by RedHorse</title>
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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/23142727">The Value of Connections</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/RedHorse/pseuds/RedHorse'>RedHorse</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>M/M, Pre-Slash, Reincarnation, Time Travel, fix-it (sort of)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-03-15</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-03-15</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-01 09:40:07</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>General Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>434</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/23142727</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/RedHorse/pseuds/RedHorse</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Rebirth as a baby fated to share Tom Riddle’s cradle gives Percy a lot of time to think.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Tom Riddle/Percy Weasley</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>5</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>98</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Collections:</b></td><td>Problematic Ships Flash Fest</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>The Value of Connections</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>
  <strong>Prompt:</strong>
</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>Percy Weasley. Stuck up, boring, prissy, smart, tired, alone, helpless.</p><p>Sometimes, late at night, Percy looks back and longs. He remembers being a young child, trying so hard to escape poverty and live his own life with his own standards. </p><p>He remembers his family taking it as betrayal, that wanting *to do something with his life* was a heinous crime.</p><p>He died achieving nothing, but then he woke up. </p><p>Stuck in wools orphanage, during the war isn’t good, especially with what looked to be a budding dark lord.</p><p>Ends as a Tom/Percy, after all, a dark lord needs a competent Secretary.</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>1.</p><p>There was a cradle close to the drafty window where the two babies the sisters preferred not to hold were kept together; they both had the unsettling tendency to stare with the self-possession of tiny adults.</p><p> </p><p>2.</p><p>Being a toddler was only a little better than being a baby with the full range of an adult's memories and awareness, but at least Percy knew that the days and years would slowly pass and his body would once again be a vehicle rather than a cage. </p><p> </p><p>3.</p><p>He'd known for a while the time was different -- it was apparent in the sisters' clothing and the snatches of conversation -- and he could live with that -- but what if the world he'd been cast into was one without magic?</p><p> </p><p>4.</p><p>Percy was called Daniel Mayhew and his constant, dark-eyed companion was called Tom Riddle, a name that tugged at the corners of Percy’s overfull memory like it had a significance he couldn’t quite place.</p><p> </p><p>5.</p><p>The first time magic spilled out of Tom and left the rat in the corner of their room seizing on the floor, Percy was awash with relief — this unreality to which he’d been reborn was a magical one after all.</p><p> </p><p>6.</p><p>He’d done nothing but plan since he’d witnessed Tom’s accidental magic — plan and corral the worst impulses of his strange cruel friend, because when Tom got in trouble invariably Percy did too.</p><p> </p><p>7.</p><p>It wasn’t that they liked one another but that they’d always been together; they had a strange symbiosis of body and habit and separation made them both uneasy.<br/>
<br/>
</p><p>8.</p><p>”It’s because you’re a wizard,” Percy finally blurted out, watching Tom’s gaze twist first in confusion and then in triumph.</p><p> </p><p>9.</p><p>Percy had suffered in his first life for want of the right connections and guidance; half the benefit of these connections was the knowledge behind them — which turned uncharted waters into navigable ones.</p><p> </p><p>10. </p><p>Percy could be his own connection, the only one he needed, in this the past of his own old world.</p><p> </p><p>11.</p><p>Tom’s uncanny magic and dark appetites worried Percy, but then he had a strange charisma too that Percy thought could be channeled, used.</p><p> </p><p>12.</p><p>At Hogwarts they were as inseparable as they’d been in life before — even the Hat didn’t dare forestall their sinister bonds, setting them both in Slytherin (that Percy ever occupied another house felt alien to him).</p><p> </p><p>13.</p><p>Tom would make Percy his servant, his lackey, but Percy knew that there was often more power in the shadows behind great men than in the hands of great men themselves.</p>
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